In the first part of the Doctor Who serial Destiny of the Daleks, Oolon Colluphid is shown as author to the book The Origins of the Universe. The Doctor scoffed at the book, saying Colluphid had "got it wrong on the first line". At the time this episode was released, Douglas Adams was working as the script editor for Doctor Who.

There is speculation that Adams based the character on friend and renowned atheist, Richard Dawkins. However, they only met after Dawkins wrote a fan-letter to Adams, after reading Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency. That was published in 1987, whereas Colluphid was mentioned as early as the first radio-script for Hitchhikers in 1978, and the book in 1979. Of course, Adams might have known who Dawkins was from The Selfish Gene (1976), but it seems unlikely he knew the extent of Dawkins' vehemence against religion from the few mentions in The Selfish Gene.

However, the radical theologian Don Cupitt claims, in his book "The Great Questions of Life", that he was the template for this heretical theologian. Cupitt is famous for leaving orthodox Anglican theology for "non-realism", which is to say ... that God is not real. He has founded the Sea of Faith to propagate a Christianity without belief.